1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to a recording and/or reproducing apparatus and method with a damper, and in particular, to a recording and/or reproducing apparatus and method installing a disk drive device, such as a hard disk drive or an optical disk drive, including a damper.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recording and/or reproducing apparatuses, such as hard disk drive devices or optical disk drive devices, may include an internal storage body, and can read information recorded on that body, e.g., while the body rotates. For example, a plurality of magnetic disks may be fixed upon a spindle in a hard disk drive, and a magnetic head may read information recorded on the magnetic disk or record information to the magnetic disk while the magnetic disk rotates. Similarly, information recorded on an optical disk medium, such as a CD or DVD, may be used in an optical disk drive. Such recording and/or reproducing apparatuses can store a large amount of information relative to other storage devices of the same size, so the hard disk drive and optical disk drive devices can be used as mass storage devices.
As an example, a hard disk drive device may include a rotating body which is easily damaged from an external impact, so the hard disk drive is normally used in stationary locations such as personal computers, instead of being used in portable devices.
However, as small-size hard disk drives, e.g., using 2.5-inch, 1-inch, and 0.8-inch magnetic disks, have been developed, not only notebooks but also MP3 players and mobile phones have been using such small hard disk drives as a storage device. Since the small-sized hard disk drives are being utilized with portable devices, and because of the increased mass storage capacity and increased data access speeds, the portable devices are able to record and reproduce various multimedia content.
However, when these small-size devices, containing such small-size hard disk drives, receives shocks, the hard disk drive may no longer be recognized by the device or may become inoperable because of the jarring to the hard disk drives. Many effective buffering methods for protecting the hard disk drive have been provided to solve this problem. However, in order to reduce the size of these small-size devices, the space available for the whole hard disk drive assembly has to be small. Reducing the size of a damper, included in the disk drive assembly, to thus further reduce the size of the hard disk drive assembly may actually result in insufficient damping being provided to the disk drive devices when the damper is reduced too much.
FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional portable hard disk drive device with a conventional damper.
Referring to FIG. 1, a hard disk drive 10 may be enclosed by a box 20, with damping elements 30 disposed along the four corners of the hard disk drive 10 to dampen shocks that could be transmitted to the hard disk drive 10. Here, the damping element 30 may cover the corner of the hard disk drive 10, with the inner surface of the damping element 30 being in contact with the hard disk drive 10.
Generally, the damping element 30 is formed from rubber or silicone by injection molding or pressing molding. In order to form a desired shape, such as a wall, band, projection, groove, etc., an elastic molding element has to have a minimum thickness of at least about 0.5 mm or more. Similarly, when producing the damping element 30 from an elastic material such as rubber or silicone, the thickness of the damping element 30 similarly has to be at least approximately 0.5 mm or more. Moreover, when forming a projection on the wall of the damping element 30, e.g., for better damping, the thickness of the damping element 30 having protrusions has to be at least approximately 1.5 mm. Accordingly, since a cover type damper covering the corner of a hard disk has to maintain a minimum thickness of the damper, within the box 20, there is a limit to how much the disk drive assembly can be reduced.
As mentioned the above, since the aforementioned cover type damper is in contact with the hard disk, reducing the thickness too much may decrease the efficiency of the dampers to absorb impacts. Of course, in order to solve this problem, the aforementioned projection may be formed along the outer surface of a cover type damper. However, since the height of the added projection increases the basic thickness of a cover type damper, the installation space required by such a disk drive may be increased.